I joined Bunny Inc. when we were less than 12 full time team members. We now have over 60.
Our biggest challenge thus far is recruiting world-class talent, both here in San Francisco and in Bogotá, Colombia. When I took the reigns of the company recruitment effort, my goal was to build a scalable, repeatable recruitment process that helps us recruit top talent for rotational (and the occasional transformational) tours of duty.
We’ve started several initiatives ranging from Mentorship Partnerships with Google, to Hackathons with the top tech companies in Bogotá. All of these initiatives help position us as a top-tier technology company in Bogotá, helping us recruit the top engineering talent in Latin America.
But to really scale and position ourselves as the Google of Latin America, I felt it was critically important to showcase our beautiful company culture, which is why Carolina and I created our recruitment videos.
These are the steps I took to create our powerful recruitment videos.
1. Identify your company culture and values
Success starts with culture: it’s the way we communicate, it’s the way we take vacations, it’s the way we make decisions. Culture drives our company and helps us attract the right people to the team.
Our Chief People Officer, Tania Zapata, has done a fantastic job crafting our company values:
- Passionate
- Collaborative
- Autonomous
- Honest
- Inquisitive
- Adaptable/Flexible
Because I understand our most important company values, I understand what kind of style and theme we need to use on our recruitment videos to attract the right talent.
2. Craft your recruitment philosophy
We need to stand out. Google, Zemoga, and Globant are huge technology companies in Latin America and they attract world-class talent just because of their name brand recognition.
I spoke to our leadership and found one very important quality that we all shared: we have all been entrepreneurs.
This is our competitive advantage. This is how we differentiate ourselves.
At Bunny Inc., we hire entrepreneurs
If you join Bunny Inc., you will receive mentorship from proven entrepreneurs that have successfully built and sold technology companies. In addition, we promise to give you exposure to areas of the company that you are most interested in to catapult your future entrepreneurial career. For example, I want more exposure and responsibilities in the product area, which is why I’m now a product owner, creating specs, designing wireframes, and leading two engineers.
3. Identify your most important positions
Every position is of course important, but there are certain positions that are highly important to scale the company. For Bunny Inc., the areas that help us scale are Operations and Engineering.
We decided to create 3 recruitment videos:
- We hire entrepreneurs
- We challenge engineers
- This is where young professionals can catapult their careers
4. Create the storyboard and topic hit list
Videos can get messy if you don’t have a clear direction. It’s important to create your storyboard and topic hit list so that you know exactly what type of footage you need to get and what sound bites you want from your team members.
We hire entrepreneurs
Story: we of course want to open with Alex (CEO of Bunny Inc.), but we don’t want to lead with something generic like “these are the reasons our company is so great”; instead, our goal is to differentiate ourselves. In addition, we don’t want to explain why we hire entrepreneurs; instead, we want to tell entrepreneurs why a position at Bunny Inc. is valuable for them.
We can therefore start with Alex explaining the immense value and experience entrepreneurs receive here at Bunny Inc. To make the story more powerful, we can follow up with 3 leaders from the company that have started their own companies. They can each explain why as entrepreneurs they’ve decided to join and stay at Bunny Inc. To top it off, Tania, can invite entrepreneurially minded people to join the company in a very welcoming manner.
Topic hit list:
- The value that entrepreneurs get at Bunny Inc.
- Stories from entrepreneurs at the company explaining why they joined the team and have stayed on the team
- Welcoming, encouraging message to join the team
We challenge engineers
What do engineers care about? How can we get the best of the best to leave their current job to join our team? After all, the best talent aren’t looking for jobs — you have to go out there and get them.
After speaking with our engineers, we identified the following hit list:
- Engineers want to be challenged
- Engineers want to build products that change the world
- Engineers want to work in a fast-paced, but comfortable and encouraging environment
With our hit list identified, we crafted our story.
Story: engineers are frustrated at big corporate companies. They’re looking for bigger challenges and an environment that is both fun and fast paced. We can therefore bring in our product and engineering leadership to speak about why they left their previous company to join Bunny Inc., and what is their proudest technical achievement at Bunny Inc. The goal is to let other engineers know that it’s ok to be frustrated and to strive to work at a company where you’re challenged and building innovative products.
Result:
This is where young professionals can catapult their careers
Our best operations team members have an eclectic background: they travel the world, speak many languages, and are on the younger side. In addition, operations is the perfect place to start as a recent college graduate or young professional because you get mentorship from proven professionals in many different areas.
Topic hit list:
- Fun, young, and worldly
- Fantastic opportunity for mentorship and growth
- Driven and hungry to change the world
Story: we want to highlight how fun and driven our operations team members are. In addition, we need to show that Bunny Inc. is a fantastic place to start your career because of the mentorship opportunities here. We also want to make sure and capture the global, worldly aspect of Bunny Inc., and highlight team members that travel, speak different languages, and that are ex pats as well.
Result:
—
Let me know what you think about our recruitment videos. Does it make you want to work here at Bunny Inc.?